A helpful guide to pursuing business goals, despite familiar platitudes.
Lobkovich, a business strategy coach, explains how to create a strategic vision and successfully implement it in this manual.
According to the author, big ideas are not enough for success. One needs a well-defined vision to make those ideas a reality, as well as an organizational culture that supports them. Most companies have something akin to a grand mission statement, but it usually isn’t composed in a way that renders it immediately actionable, says the author. What’s often missing, she says, is a “connective tissue to tie strategy to implementation,” which she calls an “alignment layer…between strategy and delivery”—an important insight that one doesn’t see often enough in literature on the topic. Without this, there can be a fatal distance between aspiration and accomplishment. The author offers two tools that aim to solve these problems: a “Connected Strategic One-Sheet” and a “No-BS Objectives and Key Results” or “OKR” form. The former is a one-page summation of one’s overarching strategic vision that promotes organizational clarity to make alignment more likely. The OKRs “fill the gap between high-level strategy and tactical implementation,” Lobkovich writes, by articulating a “goal framework” that establishes empirically measurable results, as well as clear marks of individual accountability and shared responsibility. This lucidity encourages employees to collaborate and experiment, she asserts, and even take risks, as these goals can be understood, in part, as aspirational. In impressively clear and detailed language, accompanied by numerous charts and illustrations, the author explains how one can effectively compose both documents. However, it sometimes leans of clichés of the business-book genre (“Normalize curiosity”), including obligatory references to behavioral science regarding human motivation that ultimately add nothing valuable to the author’s argument. However, the book does supply genuinely practical counsel in step-by-step form, which is likely to be helpful to anyone who wants to “unblock [their] own inner strategist.”
A helpful guide to pursuing business goals, despite familiar platitudes.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798990806603
Page Count: 306
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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